But the Free Churches, are not they the home of free thought? Are they not leaders in religious reform? Alas! they all have their dogmas and creeds to the believer in which they promise eternal life, while to the unbeliever, no matter how honest he may be, or how pure in heart and life, there is anathema maranatha. If the Church of England apes the Church of Rome, what are we to say of the conventicle, with its antiquated creed and its obsolete theology? Are they not still, in spite of their boasted freedom, under the rule of St. Augustine and the monks? Nor can it well be otherwise. You take a young man, ignorant of the world, unversed in human nature; you shut him up in a college with others as ignorant as himself. You teach him theological conundrums rather than real life. Can such as they minister to a mind diseased? Am I to be saved by listening to such as they? Ah, no!
‘In secret silence of the mind,
My heaven, and there my God, I find.’
It was so with Rose as she wandered drearily from one church door to another, seeking rest and finding none. It was clear to her that there was no room for her in the narrow circle of the Churches.
As long as you are an actress, as long as you get your living by following the stage, said they all, you cannot be a church-member, forgetting that the stage itself was, in a prior age, but the child of the Church.
One day she tried the Quakers, but there the silence was too oppressive – nor did she feel called upon to make herself singular by a display of Quaker dress or Quaker speech.
One Sunday she was in Edinburgh, staying at the house of one of the University professors. She had heard much of Scotch piety, and she wanted to see what it was like. A grand scientific gathering was being held, and the house was full of men of science. In the morning she went to church. Again she was taken to church in the afternoon, very much against the grain; but she was in Rome, and had to do as the Romans did. In the evening there was a dinner-party. As they repaired to the drawing-room, the lady of the house said:
‘It is very questionable whether we shall see any more of the gentlemen to-night. If they rise from the table sober, they will come into the drawing-room. If they take too much, they will go up by the backstairs to bed.’
The lady of the house said this as if it were the most natural thing in the world, but it shocked Rose to find that, in the city where the Sabbath is observed more strictly than anywhere else, this was how the Sabbath night was spent, and, naturally, she had little respect for the piety which could attend church twice a day on the Sunday, and make the Sunday night a convivial carouse.
What was she to do? She went to many a Congregational, or Baptist, or Unitarian, or Episcopalian church in London, where she heard much that was helpful to her spiritual life – much that it did her good to hear.
‘You can’t join my church,’ said a popular divine to her.
‘Why not?
‘Because you are an actress. My deacons would not hear of such a thing.’
‘Have you ever been to a theatre?’
‘Never!’ was the emphatic reply.
‘How, then, can you condemn that of which you are ignorant?’ asked the actress.
‘Well,’ said the preacher, ‘I can go by popular report. Look at the lives of the professionals. Was not Kean a drunkard? Did not the Duke of So-and-so keep an actress? Did not So-and-so’ – naming a popular actor – ‘run off with another man’s wife?’
‘What of that?’ said Rose. ‘I am told your predecessor in your very chapel did the same.’
The preacher did not know what to say, except that there were black sheep in all professions, and that there was a Judas even among the Apostles, and it became them all to judge in charity of one another.
‘That is what I want of you,’ said the actress.
But the preacher did not respond to her appeal, and again she left the church for the world.
Another day she tried the Methodists. Unfortunately, as she stepped in they were singing:
‘And be the business of my life
To cry, “Behold the Lamb!”’
In that church she saw some Wesleyan tradesmen whom she knew. Was that the business of their lives? Of course not. Man comes into the world to get a living and to make the most of it. The secular life is not superseded by the religious life – only adorned and purified by it.
‘You must give up your calling,’ said they all.
Indignantly she asked herself, Why? Her acting was her one talent. Was one to hide it in a napkin? Certainly not, said common-sense, and for once common-sense was right. Was she not doing good in her way, finding people innocent amusement, and teaching them, as she repeated nightly the great words of the great dramatist of our land, something of the wonder and grandeur and pathos and mystery of life? Hers was not an art to be despised. Hers was not a course of life to be abandoned at the command of a bigot, be he Roman monk or Protestant preacher. There was a time when the stage was the teacher of the people; why should it not be so now? she asked herself. It was her resolve that it should be so, as far as it was in her power. For as Tom Campbell wrote:
‘Ill can poetry express
Full many a tone of thought sublime;
And painting, mute and motionless,
Steals but one glance from Time.
But by the mighty Actor brought,
Illusion’s wedded triumphs come;
Verse ceases to be airy thought,
And Sculpture to be dumb.’
‘Ah!’ wrote Wentworth to her, ‘we need not despair of Divine mercy. Christ is bigger and broader than the Church. You in your way, and I in mine, have wandered far in search of such happiness as earth can give, and found it to be of little worth, and the sects look on us as sinners, because we refuse to bow to the image they have set up, or to utter their Shibboleth. I know not that it matters much. I know not that it matters anything at all. How can any man or any set of men pretend to have penetrated the full meaning of Scripture, or that they can bid stand back those as humble and patient in the pursuit of truth as themselves?’
One day when Robert Hall had been having a conversation with Sir James Mackintosh, he told a friend: ‘Sir, it was the Euphrates pouring itself into a teapot.’ If a great orator like Hall could say that of a fellow-man, what can we say of such Divine revelation as comes to us either by the experiences of actual life or by the world of nature around us, or by the written Word which was and is Life? How can we grasp it? How can we cut it up into dogmas and creeds? How can we say to any brother man, Believe as I believe, or be damned? The Churches have tried to do so and failed, even when they had at their back the terrors of Inquisition or the sword of the Civil Magistrates. They are beginning to understand that it is all up with priestcraft, and that the Church as it exists to-day everywhere is in danger; that they cannot stop the onward march of the people; that they cannot say to the waves of free thought, ‘Hitherto shall ye come, but no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.’ It is a kindly light that leads on, and we cannot stop. Take all the creeds, pile them one upon the top of another, and there is still a void, for the finite cannot grasp the Infinite, and man cannot by searching find out God. At the best we can but guess; at the best, and may we